The Janissary Tree

[ 43 ]

Yashim’s first waking thought was that he’d left a pan on the coals. He shot from the divan and stood unsteadily in the kitchen, rocking on his heels. He looked around in bewilderment. Everything was as it should be: the stove banked low, its hotplate barely warm; a stack of dirty pans and crockery; the blocks and knives. But he smelled burning.

From outside there rose a confused medley of cries and crashes. He glanced at the open window. The sky was lit with a glow like the early dawn, and as he watched an entire roofscape was suddenly picked out in silhouette by a huge roar of flame which shot upwards into the sky, and subsided in a trail of sparks. It was, he judged, barely a hundred yards away: one, maybe two streets off. He could hear the crack of burning timber, and smell the ashes in the air.

An hour, he thought. I give it an hour.

He looked round at his little apartment. The books ranged on the shelves. The Anatolian carpets on the floor.

“Ah, by the jewels!”

The blaze had broken out in an alleyway which opened out into the Kara Davut Sokagi. The mouth of the alley was blocked by a throng of eager sightseers, anxious householders, many of them bare-headed, and women in every stage of dishabille, though every one of them contrived to cover her nose and lips with a scrap of cloth. One woman, he noticed, had yanked up her pyjama jacket, exposing a delicious ripple of flesh around her belly while concealing her face. They were all staring at the fire, as if frozen.

Yashim looked around. In the Kara Davut, people were emerging from their houses. A man Yashim recognised as the baker was urging them to go back and fetch their buckets. He stood on a step beside the fountain at the head of the street, gesticulating. Yashim suddenly understood.

“Get these women out of here,” he shouted, prodding the men next to him. “We need a line!”

He jostled the men: the spell that had fallen over them was broken. Some of them woke up to the sight of their women, half-dressed.

“Take them over to the cafe,” Yashim suggested. He intercepted a young man running forward with a bucket.

“Give me that—get another!” He swung the bucket to a man standing nearby.

“Form a chain—take this and pass it on!”

The man seized the bucket and swung it forwards, into a pair of waiting hands. Another boy ran up to Yashim with a loaded bucket. The back of the line needed attention, Yashim realised. “You, stay here. Pass that bucket and be ready to take another.”

He darted back, seizing bystanders and hustling them into positions a few feet apart. More buckets were being produced; as fast as they came the baker swung them through the fountain and passed them down. Yashim ran along the chain, checking for gaps, and then on to the head of the line to make sure that empty buckets were being returned. For the first time he found himself in the alley.

The flames were gusting along the narrow street: as Yashim looked, a window burst in a shower of sparks and a long tongue of flame shot out and licked into the eaves of the neighbouring house. The flame retreated; but in a moment it had burst out again, tunnelled to its neighbour by the wind that was already being drawn like a bellow’s blast into the narrow opening of the alley. Yashim, standing several paces back, could feel the wind ruffling his hair even as he felt the heat on the side of his face. He felt powerless. Suddenly he remembered what had to be done.

“A break! A break!” He darted into the nearest doorway and found a whole family working the well in the backyard. “We must make a break—not here, across the street.” Nobody paid him the slightest attention: they were all busy fetching water, sloshing it onto the facade of their house which was already beginning to scorch and blister in the heat. “An axe! Give me an axe!”

The man of the house nodded to a woodpile in the corner of the yard. With a jerk Yashim flipped the broad-headed splitting axe out of the log where it had been buried and dashed out into the street.

“A break!” he yelled, brandishing the axe. Several bystanders stared at him. He turned on them. “Get your tools, people. We’ve got to take down this house.”

Without waiting for their reaction he whirled his body round with a shout and embedded the axe in the plaster infill. A piece the size of a hand fell away. He struck again: laths splintered and gave way. In a few minutes he had cleared a space large enough to wield an axe against the upright timbers. By now a few others had joined him: two men he sent through the house to check that there was no one still inside, and then to set to on the other side. He paused to catch his breath, leaning on the axe. The four men at work were stripped to the waist, the approaching firelight reflected in vivid glints in the sweat on their skin.

“Janissary work,” said one, through gritted teeth, as he chopped with the flat of his axe in short, savage blows against a tenon pin. The wooden pin was growing mashed at the end; the man made a few swift passes and cut it again, and with a heave on the flat of his axe sent it loose out the other side. Yashim gripped the pin and jerked it out.

The building gave a lurch. Several panels of plaster from the upper storey crashed down at their feet and exploded into a powder that was immediately whipped away by the rush of hot wind flaring down the street. Yashim glanced back. Two houses along, the fire was beginning to take hold. Sparks were flying past: one of the men he’d sent to the back of the house stuck his head out through a pair of uprights leaning at a drunken angle to the ground and hurriedly withdrew it. Everyone laughed.

“They’ll be out in a moment. And none too soon,” a man said. They scented victory: their mood had changed.

Sure enough, the two men appeared suddenly on the other side of the frame and darted out through the collapsed doorway.

“To think we used to get the Janissaries from the Beyazidiye Pound to do this for us!”

They were enjoying themselves now. A slithering crash from overhead told them that the joists had sprung: the planking of the upper floor leaned at an angle that was already putting pressure on the roof supports, forcing them up.

“It’s going wide!” Yashim bellowed. It was true: the whole frame of the house was sagging towards them, spinning around. “Watch out!” Yashim backed, darted forward down the street away from the fire. The others followed. At twenty yards they stopped to watch the whole frame of the house take a sudden lurch into the street like a drunk wheeling from the wall. The roof tiles seemed to hang suspended in the air until, with a crash that could be heard over the crackling of the fire and the shouts from the upper end of the street, the edifice fell with a sudden whump! and a scouring plume of dust and fragments picked up by the wind billowed towards them like an angry djinn.

Yashim hit the ground, cradling his head in his arms: it was like a desert sandstorm flying overhead. Someone nearby screamed. He pressed his face into the dirt, even as the storm of debris began to ebb. A few pieces of broken tile skittered along the ground and harmlessly struck his arms.

Cautiously he peered up over the crook of his elbow. Further along the street the fire still raged: it had caught up with them now, and the shutters of the last house standing blew open with a force that sent them rocking wildly on their hinges. But the flames that shot from the casements darted out in vain. Where there had been wood and eaves, there was only a black gap and a few stray timbers dangling from a skinny beam.

Someone stooped and helped him to his feet. He recognised the man with the axe: they shook hands and then, because the excitement had been intense and the labour was won, they embraced, three times, shoulder to shoulder.

“You did us a favour, my friend,” the other man said. He looked like a ghost, his face blanched by the dust. “Murad Eslek, me.”

Yashim grinned.

“Yashim Togalu.” Not Yashim the eunuch. “At the sign of the Stag, Kara Davut.” And then, because it was true, he added: “The debt is all mine.”

The note of cultivation in his voice caught the man by surprise.

“I’m sorry, effendi. In the dark…all this dust…I did not—”

“Forget it, friend. We are all one in the sight of God.”

Murad Eslek grinned, and gave Yashim the thumbs up.